The Shortlist Daily

26th of July 2016

Crisis on high “Deep in the Himalayas sits a remote research station that is tracking an alarming trend in climate change, with implications that could disrupt the lives of more than 1 billion people and pitch the most populated region of the world into chaos. The station lies in the heart of a region called the Third Pole, an area that contains the largest area of frozen water outside of the North Pole and South Pole. Despite its relative anonymity, the Third Pole is vitally important; it is the source of Asia’s 10 largest rivers – asdf including the Yellow, the Yangzi, the Mekong, the Irrawaddy and the Ganges – and their fertile deltas. Flows from the glaciers that give the pole its name support roughly 1.3 billion people in China, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, and the glaciers are melting fast. Chinese authorities have opened up a remote research station on the Qinghai Tibetan Plateau and revealed alarming research on the pace of global warming. Half a century of research shows the temperature has increased by 1.5 degrees in the area, more than double the global average. More than 500 glaciers have completely disappeared, and the biggest ones are retreating rapidly.”

ABC

Don’t think too positive “Positive thinking can make us feel better in the short term, but over the long term it saps our motivation, preventing us from achieving our wishes and goals, and leaving us feeling frustrated, stymied and stuck … Positive fantasies fool our minds into thinking that we’ve already achieved our goals – what psychologists call ‘mental attainment’. We achieve our goals virtually and thus feel less need to take action in the real world. As a result, we don’t do what it takes to actually succeed in achieving our goals. In multiple experiments, we found that people who positively fantasise about the future don’t, in fact, work as hard as those with more negative, questioning or factual thoughts, and this leaves them to struggle with poorer performance.”

Aeon

Eating meat and animal rights “Most of us live in ‘carninormative’ societies where meat eating is so normal that no matter how many qualms we might have about it, it just doesn’t feel wrong to most of us. … A utilitarian focus on the traceable consequences of action also means that there is a surprisingly vibrant debate among animal ethicists about whether an individual’s choice to eat meat is morally important. The problem is that modern food chains are insensitive to individual buyers’ choices and hence the principled vegetarian’s refusal to eat meat does not save a single animal life. The only consequence of abstinence is a sense of moral superiority and purity. This is the kind of nonsense that could only be spouted by a philosopher (or perhaps an economist) in the grip of a reductive, mechanistic theory that reduces morality to algorithms of cause and effect.”

The Times Literary Supplement

The last VCR will be manufactured this month “Japan’s Funai Electronics, which makes its own electronics, in addition to supplying companies like Sanyo, will produce the last batch of VCR units by July 30. The company cites difficulty in obtaining the necessary parts as one of the reasons for halting production. VCRs were launched about 40 years ago. With the rise of DVDs, Blu-ray and streaming services like Netflix, they’ve become completely obsolete. At its peak, Funai sold 15 million units of the home video system, Last year, it reported 750,000 in sales. Excluding hardcore fans, demand for VCRs is virtually nonexistent. Already there’s at least one generation that likely doesn’t know the joy of having a separate device dedicated to rewinding your tapes because that function ceased to work on the VCR—or the pain of being charged a fee for failing to return a rental tape fully rewound.”

Quartz

The terrible beauty of fire (photos) “Photographer David McNew has been covering Californian bushfires for more than a decade, and has an eye for finding the visual beauty amid the horrible destruction and efforts to battle these blazes.”

The Atlantic

25th of July 2016

Evidence of ‘torture’ of children in Darwin detention centre uncovered “Video of the tear gassing of six boys being held in isolation at the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre in Darwin in August 2014 exposes one of the darkest incidents in the history of juvenile justice in Australia. Footage reveals a pattern of abuse, deprivation and punishment of vulnerable children inside Northern Territory youth detention centres. The tear-gassing incident was described as a ‘riot’ at the time, with media reporting multiple boys had escaped their cells in the isolation wing of the prison, known as the Behavioural Management Unit (BMU), and threatened staff with weapons. But CCTV vision and handy-cam recordings made by staff show only one boy escaped his cell after it was left unlocked by a guard.”

ABC

High stakes as online gambling bets on Northern Territory “From Sportsbet and CrownBet to international brands such as William Hill and Bet365, a total of 15 online betting companies are now licensed through the Northern Territory. Even niche services such as the Weather Lottery have a licence and post office box in Darwin, the city that has fast become the gambling industry’s Australian capital. In 2008 – a year after Apple released its first iPhone, the technology in which online betting is easier than ever – a ruling in the High Court cleared the path for gambling houses to operate and advertise across state borders. With territory governments willing to work with the industry, a betting tax haven emerged. Thanks to legislation that caps money owed to the NT Treasury at $550,000 per operator, per year, the multibillion-dollar industry pumps just a few million dollars in tax into territory coffers each financial year.

The Saturday Paper

Could the mystery of a 1986 Melbourne art heist be solved? “‘Everybody knows who did it. But nobody can agree.’ That’s pretty much the only consensus about the theft of Picasso’s 1937 painting Weeping Woman from the National Gallery of Victoria in August 1986. Rumours have swirled around Melbourne in the decades since about who was behind the theft. While the painting was returned 16 days after its theft was discovered, the culprits have never been caught. Police still consider it a cold case. But could a piece of missing evidence be the key to solving one of Australia’s biggest art heists? The theft was discovered on a Monday morning when an NGV employee noticed the painting was missing from the gallery wall, with a registrar’s card in its place stating the artwork had been moved ‘to the ACT’. It soon emerged that ‘the ACT’ referred not to the Australian Capital Territory: rather, it was revealed as an acronym for Australian Cultural Terrorists.”

The Age

How women without kids are treated in 2016 “I will not have children. I will never claim ownership of the word ‘mother’ and scoop up all the tenderness and purposefulness it suggests. What’s mine instead are colder words: the IVF doctor might brand me ‘socially infertile’, the academic would describe me as ‘circumstantially childless’, and the statistician can point out that I am in a cohort of about 24% of Australian women in their reproductive years who will remain childless – or ‘child-free’, as some prefer. This is not the way my life was meant to be! I did not choose this path. Quietly, so as not to be seen, I shelter an emotion resembling grief and dare not look too far into the chasm lest I topple in and cannot ever find a way back out … It is only when almost every other woman you know is a mother and your own time is nearly done that you fully understand the implications of being a non-mother.”

22nd of July 2016

Russian Olympic ban upheld; Moscow denounces ‘crime against sport’ “Sport’s highest tribunal rejected on Thursday Russia;s appeal against a doping ban for its entire athletics team from the Rio Olympics starting in 15 days’ time, drawing swift and angry condemnation from Moscow. The decision by the Swiss-based Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) increases the possibility that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) will now exclude Russia from all sports, not just track and field, in Rio de Janeiro. That would mark the deepest crisis in the Olympic movement since the US and Soviet boycotts of the 1980s, and would be a grave blow to a nation that prides itself on its status as a sporting superpower. ‘CAS rejects the claims/appeal of the Russian Olympic Committee and 68 Russian athletes,’ CAS said in a statement that backed the right the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) to suspend the Russian athletics federation. Russian officials, and many ordinary people in the country, have interpreted the doping allegations as part of a conspiracy inspired by Western governments who fear Moscow's growing influence.”

Reuters

I’m with the banned “I should probably explain how, on a hot, weird night in Cleveland, I came to be riding in the backseat of Milo Yiannopoulos’ swank black trollmobile to the gayest neo-fascist rally at the RNC. Milo is a charming devil and one of the worst people I know. I have seen the death of political discourse reflected in his designer sunglasses. We met four years ago, before he was the self-styled ‘most fabulous supervillain on the internet’, when he was just another floppy-haired right-wing pundit and we were guests on opposing sides of a panel show. Afterwards we got hammered in the green room and ran around the BBC talking about boys. It was fun. Since that day, there is absolutely nothing I have been able to say to Milo to persuade him that we are not friends. The more famous he gets off the back of extravagantly abusing women and minorities, the more I tell him I hate him and everything he stands for, the more he laughs and asks when we’re drinking. I’m a radical queer feminist leftist writer burdened with actual principles. He thinks that’s funny and invites me to his parties.” (Also: Live updates from the Republican National Convention and The convention in photos)

Medium

Marngrook: the origins of Australian football and the denial of Indigenous history “The Indigenous game of marngrook and its claimed connection to Australian rules football has provoked unusually intense debate. Several accounts of Indigenous football reveal a striking similarity with key features of the Australian game, suggesting an unarticu­lated link between the two games. In the insistent denial of such a link, a critical factor has been that none of these historic accounts of Indigenous football has placed the game directly in the Western District of Victoria, in the area where Tom Wills lived … A personal recollection by Mukjarrawaint man Johnny Connolly is the clearest and most detailed eye-witness account yet found of an Indigenous game of football. Most significantly this remarkable account, found among the personal papers of the ethnographer AW Howitt, is the only account by someone who actually played the game. And he played it in the Grampians region in the Western District of Victoria, precisely where Tom Wills lived.”

Meanjin

The unified theory of deliciousness “My first breakthrough on this idea was with salt. It’s the most basic ingredient, but it can also be hellishly complex. A chef can go crazy figuring out how much salt to add to a dish. But I believe there is an objectively correct amount of salt, and it is rooted in a counterintuitive idea. Normally we think of a balanced dish as being neither too salty nor undersalted. I think that’s wrong. When a dish is perfectly seasoned, it will taste simultaneously like it has too much salt and too little salt. It is fully committed to being both at the same time. Try it for yourself. Set out a few glasses of water with varying amounts of salt in them. As you taste them, think hard about whether there is too much or too little salt. If you keep experimenting, you’ll eventually hit this sweet spot. You’ll think that it’s too bland, but as soon as you form that thought, you’ll suddenly find it tastes too salty. It teeters. And once you experience that sensation, I guarantee it will be in your head any time you taste anything for the rest of your life.” (Also: How food became a matter of morals)

21st of July 2016

Erdogan declares 3-month state of emergency in Turkey “Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has declared a three-month state of emergency in the country in the aftermath of the coup attempt last Friday. The decision, announced in a televised press conference on Wednesday night, came after marathon meetings of the country’s national security council and the cabinet in Ankara. It also comes as concerns grow over the scale of the ensuing crackdown that has targeted thousands of judges, civil servants, teachers, police officers and soldiers, and amid widespread fears of growing authoritarianism on the part of Erdoğan. Some 60,000 bureaucrats, soldiers, policemen, prosecutors and academic staff have come under the government’s spotlight, many of them facing detention or suspension over alleged links to the Gülenist movement and the coup plotters.” (Also: The Erdogan loyalists and the Syrian refugees)

The Guardian

Fences: A Brexit diary “Extreme inequality fractures communities, and after a while the cracks gape so wide the whole edifice comes tumbling down. In this process everybody has been losing for some time, but perhaps no one quite as much as the white working classes who really have nothing, not even the perceived moral elevation that comes with acknowledged trauma or recognized victimhood. The left is thoroughly ashamed of them. The right sees them only as a useful tool for its own personal ambitions. This inconvenient working-class revolution we are now witnessing has been accused of stupidity—I cursed it myself the day it happened—but the longer you look at it, you realize that in another sense it has the touch of genius, for it intuited the weaknesses of its enemies and effectively exploited them. The middle-class left so delights in being right! And so much of the disenfranchised working class has chosen to be flagrantly, shamelessly wrong.” (Also: Grieving for a lost empire)

The New York Review of Books

Can a woman’s voice ever be right? “In ancient Rome, women were forbidden from speaking in the forum, but during the civil wars and political tumult of the late republic, the rules about public oration loosened a bit, which is why we know of Caia Afrania, who insisted on speaking for herself when she came before the court. She also acted as a lawyer for others, which was common among men but unheard of for women. The hostility she suffered for this perceived impudence was tremendous. An ‘Afrania’ became slang for an unpleasant woman. Rome passed a law forbidding women to plead cases other than their own. The rancor was directed not just at the fact of her speech but at the sound of her voice. The writer Valerius Maximus called it an ‘unnatural yapping’, a ‘bark’, a ‘constant harassment of the magistrate’. Detractors pronounced her shameless for exposing her voice before so many. We know only her death date (48 AD) because, as Maximus wrote, ‘with unnatural freaks like this it’s more important to record when they died than when they were born’.”

The Cut

When cuteness comes of age “In Japan, the national fascination with cuteness is traced to girls’ handwriting. Around 1970 schoolgirls in Japan began to imitate the caption text in manga comics – what was called koneko-ji, or ‘kitten writing’. By 1985, half of the girls in Japan had adopted the style, and companies marketing pencils, notebooks and other inexpensive gift items, like Sanrio, learned that these items sold better when festooned with a variety of characters, the queen of whom is Hello Kitty. Her full name is Kitty White, and she has a family and lives in London (a fad for all things British hit Japan in the mid-1970s). The first Hello Kitty product, a vinyl coin purse, went on sale in 1974. Today, about $5 billion worth of Hello Kitty merchandise is sold annually. In Asia, there are Hello Kitty amusement parks, restaurants and hotel suites. EVA Air, the Taiwanese airline, flies seven Hello Kitty-themed jets, which carry images of Hello Kitty and her friends not only on their hulls, but throughout their cabins, from the pillows and antimacassars to, in the bathroom, toilet paper emblazoned with Hello Kitty’s face.”

20th of July 2016

It’s official: Republican Party nominates Donald Trump for president “Donald Trump supporters celebrated their once unthinkable capture of the Republican presidential nomination on Tuesday night as state delegates took turns to count up the votes from his remarkable sweep of the party’s 2016 primary election. Crossing the threshold of 1,237 votes, Trump officially became the Republican party’s nominee for president. The official confirmation of the 2016 nominee was in little doubt after a last-minute procedural rebellion was quickly killed off on Monday, but the ceremonial ‘call of the roll of states’ served as a powerful reminder of the scale of his victory over 16 competing candidates with the largest ever vote haul in a Republican primary. ‘It is my honour to throw Donald Trump over the top with 89 delegates,’ said his son Donald Trump Jr as he announced the results from his home state of New York. ‘Congratulations Dad, we love you.’” (Also: Day 2 of the Republican Convention)

The Guardian

My Venezuela nightmare: A 30-day hunt for food in a starving land “I drive by the supermarkets in the morning to give them a quick look. No chance. They’re so jam-packed, there isn’t even a spot to park. I’m on the prowl for something, anything I can take back to my two kids—an eight-year-old boy and ten-year-old girl—and husband Isaac. I step into a pharmacy. Isaac is running low on his cholesterol medication. His doctor has prescribed him Vytorin or Hiperlipen. The store has neither. But wait, the pharmacist says: there’s a lab in India that just cut a deal with the government to supply medicine here; they produce an anti-cholesterol pill. I don’t like the idea at all—who knows what this stuff is?—but it’s better, I figure, than taking the risk that he’ll run out of medicine. I grab four boxes. Around midday, I swing by a bakery in search of bread. I’m greeted, impatiently, by a young woman. ‘We only sell bread at 5 p.m., señora.’ As I get back in my car, I realize I’m low on cash. I head to a nearby ATM. It’s out of money. Later, as my day’s winding down, I stumble upon a little treasure. At a local kiosk, I spot a generic, lactose-based product. It isn’t quite milk—that’s almost impossible to find—but it’s worth a try. Maybe the kids will like it.”

Bloomberg

The cult of the anonymous artist “Elena Ferrante is ultra-trendy right now, and has emerged as Italy’s leading candidate for a Nobel Prize in Literature. Except there’s a tiny problem—she probably won’t show up to accept a Nobel Prize. In fact, readers have no idea who Elena Ferrante really is. Ferrante isn’t her real name, and the author might not even be a woman. By the same token, Satoshi Nakamoto deserves a Nobel Prize in Economics for his creation of bitcoin, the cryptocurrency that is changing the world of international finance. But there’s a problem here too—no one knows Nakomoto’s real identity. Banksy is the world’s most famous street artist. Every new work stirs up media attention, and the artist’s net worth is estimated to be north of $20 million. But don’t expect to see Banksy in public. The painter’s true identity is shrouded in secrecy … Welcome to the strange world of modern-day fame, when it helps to be a nobody if you want to be a somebody!”

The Daily Beast

The academics bewitched by boredom “When I told colleagues that I was travelling 5000 miles to attend a conference on boredom, the first reaction was, inevitably, a sardonic chuckle. But I also sensed that people felt on some level threatened or even scornful, channelling comeuppance on a group of scholars that they suspected might be trivial or trendy, or, even worse, flouting the taboo of that which shall not be named in our scholarly endeavours. It’s especially interesting to me, at the point where I have spent more years of my life as an academic than not, to think about how we do what we do. Why do we crowd like sheep on straight and narrow scholarly pathways, instead of venturing off somewhere less shopworn? We are supposed to be seekers of original and unique truths, creators of new knowledge, but we spend a lot of time writing the same books (or books so similar as to defy distinction) over and over. War, Shakespeare, race, gender, culture, sexuality, unemployment: there’s nothing wrong with any of these topics, but, as Peggy Lee sang, “Is that all there is?” Shouldn’t we be trying something new, something outside the box?” (Also: Martha Nussbaum, the philosopher of feelings)

19th of July 2016

How the haters and losers made Donald Trump “I had chronicled a couple of days spent inside the billionaire’s bubble and confidently concluded that his long-stated presidential aspirations were a sham. He had tweeted about me frequently in the weeks following its publication — often at odd hours, sometimes multiple times a day — denouncing me as a ‘dishonest slob’ and ‘true garbage with no credibility’ … As Trump completed his conquest of the Republican Party this year, I contemplated my supposed role in the imminent fall of the republic — retracing my steps; poring over old notes, interviews, and biographies; talking to dozens of people. What had most struck me during my two days with Trump was his sad struggle to extract even an ounce of respect from a political establishment that plainly viewed him as a sideshow. But what I didn’t realize at the time was that he’d felt this way for virtually his entire life — face pressed up against the window, longing for an invitation, burning with resentment, plotting his revenge.” (Also: Chaos at the Republican National Convention and Is Donald Trump working for Russia? And The end of a Republican party and Trump’s ghostwriter tells all and How Trump won)

Buzzfeed

Songs to live by: The Arrernte Women’s Project “I leave the store clutching to my chest multiple frozen kangaroo tails. They are each a metre or more in length and are freezing my tits off. Our campsite is a cluster of newly made corrugated-iron rooms that we have rented in a bush location just outside Alice Springs. There is a commercial kitchen, a big load of wood that the men have kindly gathered for our campfires, and a recently prepared dance ground. The senior ladies have instructed that their beds be taken outside, as they like to sleep under the stars. A sign out the front reads ‘No Men’, to warn the occasional bloke who unwittingly stumbles into camp looking for his wife or mother, only to be immediately abused and ejected … Our continent was once alive with song. In hundreds of languages, the Dreaming, which recounts how the world was created, was delivered in song. There were also environmental songs to bring forth abundant supplies of plants and animals. There were songs to heal the sick, songs to make a person fall in love, songs to turn boys into men, and songs just for entertainment. The Arrernte ladies have come to our camp to record what remains in their living memory of these songs.”

The Monthly

Why are we still waiting for a birth-control pill for men? “Why was a birth-control pill for men never made? It certainly wasn’t because of a lack of scientific interest. Gregory Pincus, who co-invented the female contraceptive pill, first tested the same hormonal approach on men in 1957, and various hormonal and non-hormonal methods have been explored since. And although attitudes among those who might use a male pill were once thought to be a daunting obstacle, it’s now clear that many men want a new option. Despite this, we’re still waiting. Developing a method that men would accept has brought decades of frustration, yet researchers are as confident as they can be that they’re close to overcoming the scientific barriers. But, crucially, drug makers’ commitment to contraceptives has always been tentative, particularly when it comes to products for men – and today, the whole contraceptive industry is struggling. Now, the multimillion-dollar question seems to be: Who is actually going to make the male pill happen?”

Quartz

Taste-testing the history of the hamburger “Where did the hamburger really come from? The theories vary, with old recipes being discussed and debated far more often than they are eaten. Plenty of historians have argued over whether a recipe from Apicius, a fourth-century Roman cookbook, really constitutes a hamburger. Prevailing wisdom says that the modern hamburger evolved from another ground meat dish called Hamburg steak that made its way from Germany to the United States, where the addition of a bun made it the hamburger of today. What could be learned by recreating a few of the key dishes in the evolution of the hamburger? I decided to find out … The recipe calls for nuts but does not specify which type. Pistachios were commonly available in Rome so that was what we used. The recipe also calls for wine without specifying the varietal. The exact varieties of wine grapes grown in the Roman empire have been difficult to trace, and it isn’t clear which modern varieties are descended from them, but we do know that wealthy people generally drank white wines and the poor drank reds. As such, we selected a pinot grigio for the recipe.”

My year undercover with Australia’s Islamic radicals “I wrap a checked shirt around my head and pull up the hoodie to conceal my face. Holding a makeshift Islamic State flag on a piece of paper, I take a deep breath, then I hit ‘Record’ on my phone. ‘I pledge my allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and the caliphate Dawlat al-Islam.’ Then I hit send. It’s June 29, 2015. I’m a journalist, and I’ve just pledged my allegiance to the Islamic State. Three hours later I get a response. Melbourne recruiter Neil Prakash, one of Australia’s top Islamic State leaders, writes back from Syria using Surespot, one of the many new, encrypted instant messaging services used by terrorists and radicals. ‘Well done brother,’ Prakash writes. ‘Now you must go meet other brothers.’ That was it. I was in. No going back now.”

The Age

The LED lightbulb quandary “The thousand-hour life span of the modern incandescent bulb dates to 1924, when representatives from the world’s largest lighting companies—including such familiar names as Philips, Osram, and General Electric (which took over Shelby Electric circa 1912)—met in Switzerland to form Phoebus, arguably the first cartel with global reach. The bulbs’ life spans had by then increased to the point that they were causing what one senior member of the group described as a ‘mire’ in sales turnover. And so, one of its priorities was to depress lamp life, to a thousand-hour standard. The effort is today considered one of the earliest examples of planned obsolescence at an industrial scale … The lighting industry has a term, ‘socket saturation’, that describes the point at which enough short-lived incandescent bulbs have been replaced by durable LED bulbs that light-bulb sales as a whole begin to decline. Market-analysis firms such as IHS Technology and Strategies Unlimited predict that socket saturation will be felt across the global market in 2019.”

The New Yorker

The best time I pretended I hadn’t heard of Slavoj Žižek “This is the Žižek game, and I am going to teach you how to play it. It is for when you have an itch to scratch, and that itch is called, ‘a puerile desire to get on other people’s nerves’. All you do is stonily deny any knowledge of a person or cultural touchstone that you should, by virtue of your other cultural reference points, be aware of. These will of course be different for everyone, but my favorites include: Žižek, John Updike, MORRISSEY (only for experts), Radiohead, Twin Peaks, David Lynch in general, Banksy (only for streetfighters), Withnail and I, Bauhaus (movement), Bauhaus (band) … Your success in this game depends on your ability to cope with people thinking you are dumb. I pretend I’ve never heard of Roman Polanski all the time. I do not falter, and neither must you. Your opponent must never have the satisfaction of looking down on you. When they begin to scoff and roll their eyes, because how could you have never heard of the Weimar Republic, you must simply smile and shrug your shoulders.” (Also: Group Therapy, the game)

15th of July 2016

Truck rams Bastille Day crowd in Nice killing at least 70 “At least 70 people were killed and around 100 more were injured when an armed man drove a lorry at full speed into a crowd who had gathered to watch the Bastille Day fireworks display over the seafront in Nice on Thursday night. French anti-terror police are investigating after the driver careered into the dense crowd and continued to drive into them for a distance of 2km. The French interior ministry confirmed that the driver was shot dead by police, who are investigating whether the lone driver had acted alone or had accomplices. A police source told Le Monde that the driver was armed. Christian Estrosi, head of the local region, said there were explosives in the van. The date of the attack – France’s national day of celebration – was seen as symbolic coming after 130 people were killed in November’s coordinated Paris attacks on a stadium, bars and a rock gig at the Bataclan concert venue.

The Guardian

Publishing can break your heart “All writers complain about editors and agents, but with Helen DeWitt it can seem close to mania. She uses the word morons a lot, spoke of TPWs (‘typical publishing wankers’), and says she has a long blacklist and a short whitelist of editors and agents in New York and London. (She tells me I am in a gray zone between the lists.) … Once, after a book deal that she negotiated herself fell apart, she took a sedative and put a plastic bag over her head, but she couldn’t fall asleep. She sent an email to a lawyer asking that she ignore the previous email about disposing of her corpse. She went to Niagara Falls, but by the time she got there Reuters had reported her disappearance and a policeman picked her up on the street and took her to a hospital. Six years later, after the agent Bill Clegg failed to sell Lightning Rods to about a dozen publishers and resigned as her agent, she sent him a suicide email and set out to throw herself off a cliff near Brighton. She halted the plan after her ex-husband wrote saying he was expecting his first child with his second wife.”

Vulture

Everything else was sacrificed “Degas’ verbal sallies, like his pictures, were witty, but not cheaply so. They carried hard truths as a boat carries ballast. He could be cruel, but – unlike, for instance, Oscar Wilde – he was rarely catty. Acutely aware of his own shortcomings, he was preternaturally alert to weaknesses in others and prepared in advance to exploit them. When Wilde asked him, ‘You know how well known you are in Britain?’ – a question just shy of a compliment – Degas picked up precisely on what had been withheld, and turned it back on Wilde: ‘Fortunately,’ he said, ‘less so than you.’ Suzanne Valadon, a younger protégé of Degas, noted that their short-legged colleague Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec ‘dresses in your clothes’; his art, she meant, was too visibly influenced by Degas. Degas replied with virtuosic cruelty: ‘But adjusting them to his size.’ Similarly, when the painter Henri Michel-Lévy sold a work Degas had given him in a friendly exchange, Degas sent him a brutal note: ‘You have done a despicable thing,’ he wrote. ‘You knew very well I couldn’t sell your portrait.’”

The Monthly

A manifesto against ‘parenting’ “People sometimes use ‘parenting’ just to describe what parents actually do, but more often, especially now, ‘parenting’ means something that parents should do. ‘To parent’ is a goal-directed verb; it describes a job, a kind of work. The goal is to somehow turn your child into a better or happier or more successful adult—better than they would be otherwise, or (though we whisper this) better than the children next door. The right kind of ‘parenting’ will produce the right kind of child, who in turn will become the right kind of adult … Working to achieve a particular outcome is a good model for many crucial human enterprises. It’s the right model for carpenters or writers or businessmen. You can judge whether you are a good carpenter or writer or CEO by the quality of your chairs, your books or your bottom line. In the ‘parenting’ picture, a parent is a kind of carpenter; the goal, however, is not to produce a particular kind of product, like a chair, but a particular kind of person.”

14th of July 2016

The takeover “It was one of the world’s largest and most secure paedophile networks – an online space where tens of thousands traded horror. The website dealt in abuse; video and images of children, swapped and boasted about on a dark-web forum, accessible only through an encrypted browser. Membership was tightly managed. Quiet accounts raised suspicion and could be suddenly terminated. Those who stayed had to upload new material frequently. More than 45,000 people complied. But what those thousands never realised, even as heavy users began to disappear, was that the site was being run by police. For six months in 2014, inside a pale office block in Brisbane, an elite squad of detectives were administering the site: analysing images, monitoring conversations, connecting users with their crimes. By the time they pulled the plug on the forum 85 children had been rescued and hundreds of people across the globe arrested.”

The Guardian

Immigration, asylum seekers and Australia “In previous large episodes of resistance to new arrivals—after the Second World War, after Vietnam—the dominant driver was racism. In the late 1990s, when Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party was at the height of its powers, the concern was about the ‘Asianisation’ of Australia. Today the single most important driver of resistance to asylum seekers is religious prejudice, something entirely absent from previous episodes. It is expressed as concern about the ‘Islamisation’ of Australia … Whereas racial prejudice, particularly against Asians, has been a constant element in Australian life from the time of the gold rush, and was embedded through the White Australia policy, religious prejudice has generally been confined to Catholic–Protestant sectarianism and isolated outbreaks of anti-Semitism. So Australia is now redefining the ‘other’—the person who is different from us—primarily on religious and not racial grounds. This is a historically significant shift.”

Meanjin

In New Zealand, lands and rivers can be people (legally speaking) “Can a stretch of land be a person in the eyes of the law? Can a body of water? In New Zealand, they can. A former national park has been granted personhood, and a river system is expected to receive the same soon. The unusual designations, something like the legal status that corporations possess, came out of agreements between New Zealand’s government and Maori groups. The two sides have argued for years over guardianship of the country’s natural features. Chris Finlayson, New Zealand’s attorney general, said the issue was resolved by taking the Maori mind-set into account. ‘In their worldview, “I am the river and the river is me,”’ he said. ‘Their geographic region is part and parcel of who they are.’ From 1954 to 2014, Te Urewera was an 821-square-mile national park on the North Island, but when the Te Urewera Act took effect, the government gave up formal ownership, and the land became a legal entity with ‘all the rights, powers, duties and liabilities of a legal person’, as the statute puts it.”

The New York Times

How Russia fell back in love with Stalin “Opinion polls consistently indicate that millions of Russians not only continue to experience nostalgia for the Soviet era, but also desire its resurrection. In 2015, in a poll carried out by the Moscow-based RBK television channel – one of the few non-state-run, major media outlets left in Vladimir Putin’s Russia – just over 60 per cent of respondents indicated that the thing they wished for most for their homeland was the ‘rebirth of the Soviet Union’. (That poll was no one-off: this April, a public opinion survey by the independent, Moscow-based Levada Centre reported similar results.) A popular TV channel – named, appropriately enough, Nostalgia – taps into these widespread sentiments by broadcasting nothing but Soviet-era programmes. The channel’s motto: ‘For those who have something to remember’ … The language of Stalinist terror has made a startling return to Russian political life, with Putin labelling Kremlin critics as ‘national traitors’ and a ‘fifth column’. Putin has praised Stalin’s wartime leadership and his postwar development of Soviet industry.”

13th of July 2016

How technology disrupted the truth “Twenty-five years after the first website went online, it is clear that we are living through a period of dizzying transition. For 500 years after Gutenberg, the dominant form of information was the printed page: knowledge was primarily delivered in a fixed format, one that encouraged readers to believe in stable and settled truths. Now, we are caught in a series of confusing battles between opposing forces: between truth and falsehood, fact and rumour, kindness and cruelty; between the few and the many, the connected and the alienated; between the open platform of the web as its architects envisioned it and the gated enclosures of Facebook and other social networks; between an informed public and a misguided mob … Increasingly, what counts as a fact is merely a view that someone feels to be true – and technology has made it very easy for these ‘facts’ to circulate with a speed and reach that was unimaginable in the Gutenberg era (or even a decade ago).”

The Guardian

China is rewriting the book on human origins “Most Chinese palaeontologists — and a few ardent supporters from the West — think that transitional fossils are evidence that Peking Man was an ancestor of modern Asian people. In this model, known as multiregionalism or continuity with hybridization, hominins descended from H. erectus in Asia interbred with incoming groups from Africa and other parts of Eurasia, and their progeny gave rise to the ancestors of modern east Asians. Support for this idea also comes from artefacts in China. In Europe and Africa, stone tools changed markedly over time, but hominins in China used the same type of simple stone instruments from about 1.7 million years ago to 10,000 years ago. According to Gao Xing, an archaeologist at the IVPP, this suggests that local hominins evolved continuously, with little influence from outside populations.”

Nature

Inside the world’s chicest cult “Teachers come forward and introduce their workshops—there are close to 100—one by one, which takes well over an hour. There's one on multiple-hand ayurvedic breast massage, a braiding circle, sacred tarot, ‘mapping feminine wisdom’, and something described as ‘calling the salmon home’ (which sounds like a potential sex act, but is in fact about ‘water healing’.) One instructor introduces herself as ‘a honeybee priestess in the British tradition’. This is the kind of place where fellow women are always referred to as your ‘sisters’— as in ‘make sure there's enough for your sisters’, when you ask for another spoonful of guacamole on your vegetarian enchilada casserole. Menstruation is universally referred to as your ‘moon time’; there is a Moon Lodge with a ‘Moon Blood Earth Altar’ where we are encouraged to offer our ‘Holy Menstrual Blood to Mother Earth’ with prayers and intentions.”

Harper’s Bazaar

The age of flatulence “The Anthropocene is the age of flatulence. Cars, ships, and trains belch copiously into the air as they transport an ever-growing number of bodies and goods across the globe. Shale gas, which is released through the hydraulic fracturing or fracking of deep shale formations, is rapidly growing in importance as a source of natural gas in the United States, even as some scientists warn that it has ‘the largest greenhouse warming consequences of any fossil fuel’ over a short timescale. But cars and fracked wells are rivaled in their greenhouse gas footprint by another critical actor in this unfolding script: gassy cows who give new meaning to the familiar phrase silent but deadly.” (Also: Bernie Sanders delegates to hold ‘fart-in’ protest at Democratic convention)